Yesterday, 8BIT dropped the first preview of Standard 3.0.

For those of you that have been reading this site via web browser (rather than RSS) for sometime, you’ve probably seen the design under going changes for the past few weeks as I’ve been using this as a sandbox for some of the features.

Standard 3

The preview is available for Support Licesees, but I’m excited about this version of the product for a number of reasons.

We’ve completely rewritten the product from the ground up. Some of the notable features include:

  • Adaptive layout built into the theme so that your site looks consistent across devices
  • SEO guardrails that prevent you from selecting too many categories or drafting post titles that are too long
  • Support for standard, status, image, link, quote, and video post formats all of which are uniquely styled
  • Three different layout options and social network integration
  • Activity Tabs widget that includes customizable display options for your recent posts, popular posts, comments, etc.

From a development standpoint, I’m particularly proud of this release because it includes the first iteration of the Standard Framework – a true framework designed and developed to make theme and plugin creation significantly easier. It interfaces with the native WordPress Settings API and abstracts the validation and security code so that users can focus on building streamlined administration pages.

We’ve also tightly integrated with WordPress. At this point, the WordPress Platform offers a number of features that go a long way in helping to customize the look and feel of your blog. Rather than re-invent the wheel, we’d rather build on top of it. Standard now consists of a healthy marriage between native and custom functionality – we’re playing up to our strengths just as much as we’re playing up to WordPress’ strengths.

Though we still have some significant development to do before launching final, we’ll be releasing several iterations of Preview to continue showcasing our progress. Excited!